Dec 4, 2016
Spending Time with a Modern Day Slave-Catcher (Gretna Part 3)
I spend part of my time as an on-air correspondent for the National Geographic television show, Explorer. Two weeks ago, my story aired about policing in Gretna. This is Part 3 of a written series I am publishing to provide more background information and perspective that could not fit into the episode. Part 1 is here, and Part 2 is here. Part 3 begins… now.
On the way, Waze, the GPS navigation app, routed me through side streets. After all I had learned, I didn’t want to be on side streets in Gretna of all places. Then it struck me: Waze should have Racism Mode. If you’re in an area that’s potentially racist, it just keeps you on the freeway the whole time. That’s it. Freeways and major, well-lit thoroughfares with perfect cellular data coverage. That’s not a time to be efficient Waze, it’s time to be alive.
So we rolled up to our destination, and I realized: at no point in agreeing to do this story about policing did I expect to take a midnight ride with a man named “Tat-2” in a four-door pickup truck named “Relentless” which held more guns than people. But apparently, to understand parts of the U.S. criminal justice system, such acts are required.
A short civics lesson: Gretna, like many towns, raises municipal funds from “fines, fees, and forfeitures.” Unlike many towns, around 15 percent of the city budget comes from these sources while the national average is one percent. This becomes a more complex problem when you realize the causal chain linking policing with fines with courts with salaries for court employees with more fines and with eventual jail time or imprisonment. One link in this causal chain is the bail bondsman who covers the bond deposit amount (aka bail) on behalf of the accused, essentially loaning the accused the money. If that person fails to appear in court as assigned or fails to pay the bail bondsman on time, the bail bondsman has to pay the full amount of the bond to the court. To avoid this financial hit, the bail bondsman will hire a bounty hunter to retrieve people skipping on bail.
Tat-2 is a bounty hunter. It’s a profession most of the world has outlawed, except for several U.S. states and the Phillipines (where the new leader has basically said extrajudicial killings are kinda cool). He’s been at it for 17 years which followed previous careers as a police officer and a servicemember in the U.S. military. He wanted to get into mercenary work, but he couldn’t find a way in, so he chose bounty hunting. After five failed marriages, this job is his most long-standing and stable relationship.
Tat-2 took me through all the numbers and some of the financial relationships. He works for bail bondsmen to collect their debts (aka people), and he works on behalf of insurance companies who have built a commercial business out of “helping” people avoid jail. He sees his role as one of keeping the country together, almost literally. In his words:
I think without the bail system the whole system falls apart… Let’s use Chicago for example, Chicago has hundreds of thousands of unserved warrants. Chicago did away with the bail system quite a few years ago. Chicago’s talking about going back to the bond system because they have all these people that have warrants and they don’t have the manpower or the police to actually serve them.
My thing is this, it’s come to a point where we arrest people for warrants, the police arrest people for warrants… The court has ordered us to pick you up because you failed to appear in court… I think the bail system itself is in the middle. It is the determining factor of making or breaking a situation. Because you don’t have enough manned police officers in the world, America. Statistics prove, 85% or more of all wanted fugitives are brought back to jail and justice by bounty hunters. And I’m not taking anything away from police. By no means because my Mom, my Dad, me, my Uncle, my Grandpa, my sister, my brother-in-law all cops. My sister and my brother in law are still cops.
And there was so much more, too much more to share here, 64 pages of transcripts with this one man who had a theory on just about everything including Black Lives Matter, the role of God in America, how social media is destroying us, why we should turn off our phones, and Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump. On this last one he thought they were both terrible.
One, he said, would take away all our guns. The other would get us into a stupid war because he has no self-control. He’s probably right about the latter. In talking about the presidency in general, he said he didn’t think any one person should have that much power. Then he checked himself: “I wield the ultimate power. I take away people’s freedom every day.” Tat-2 estimates he has returned over 15,000 people to his customers.
As I read through the Wikipedia entry for bounty hunter, and as I saw the intense search methods Tat-2 and his team deployed to find people (including a terrifying use of electronic databases and social media), I flashed back to the TV series Underground, and I realized I was witness to modern-day slave-catching.
“What we have to ask ourselves is ‘Are we recreating the plantation system?’”
That’s what Dr. Peter Scharf said to me at Rebellion Bar in New Orleans the night of the District 1 Community Meeting. I was speechless. I expect that language from a student of Stokely Carmichael, not an architect of Broken Windows policing. “Holy shit, this story just keeps getting interesting,” I thought.
It’s a shame none of that conversation could make it to air, but such is the documentary business. It was my beer-drinking time with these academics which connected my witnessing of modern-day Gretna with the unique history of slavery in New Orleans, the chaos wrought by Hurricane Katrina, and the high price paid by the impoverished for a diluted version of justice in America’s broken system.
These two were willing to talk about the trade-off we’ve made, not just in Louisiana, but across the United States, where we went very harsh on crime and punishment among certain people, blew up the prison population, and made it impossible for folks to responsibly re-enter the economy. At times, I thought I was in a study group for Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. One of them would say something like “essentially stop-and-frisk was an attack on civil liberties” or “some neighborhoods here are a narco-economy like Northern Mexico” or “we’ve offered citizens a Hobson’s choice” or, with respect to mass incarceration, “What we have to ask ourselves is ‘Are we recreating the plantation system?’” I mean, damn.
While I found most of Gretna’s public officials to be in denial about the cost of their policies, I had to admit it was to their credit that they hired these two to peel back the layers. When I asked how they got involved with Gretna PD, they explained that the Fusion piece set the town on edge, and they were hired in direct response to dig into the numbers that that investigation revealed.
So, in the same week that I found such a large gap between public officials and public sentiment, I also was reminded that journalism matters, and it’s not the only light at the end of this dark tunnel. The brightest source of hope I found was in the form of a nun.
— — —
Back in May 2014, I was on Real Time with Bill Maher with Sister Simone, an amazing activist and nun you don’t want to mess with. This summer at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, I ran into her on the street. She was giving out lemonade. Really. We got to talking and I told her I would be heading down to NOLA for this Gretna piece. She introduced me to a fellow lemonade-peddler and nun, Sister Alison McCrary.
Sister Alison is the director of the Community-Police Mediation Program for citizen complaints against New Orleans police officers. It doesn’t operate in Gretna, but I think it represents a model that should be extended.
The Independent Police Monitor in NOLA is responsible for fielding civilian complaints against officers. This rarely results in action or accountability and almost never results in reconciliation or anything approaching healing. The mediation program, on the other hand, offers citizens and officers the chance to enter a direct dialogue, with one support person of their choice, and two trained, volunteer mediators, at a neutral location.
Check out the research documents and program description. If you like PDF files, check the 2015 annual report. I was invited to a training simulation of what an actual mediation might look like, and I was floored. The citizen was able to explain why the officer’s actions made him feel disrespected and abused. The officer was able to explain that he was technically off-duty, working to get home to his family, and focused on disbursing crowds after hours, when violence is more prone to erupt.
Neither person could undo the interaction, but both could see the incident from the other person’s point of view. Both could acknowledge there was something they could have done differently. This is not how we are used to handling police-community interactions. And it’s not to say that all cases can be neatly tied up with listening sessions and a sense of equal responsibility for what goes wrong. But if we don’t do something more like this, we will not close the widening trust gap.
I felt that the entire city of Gretna could benefit from something like Sister Alison’s mediation. The entire country could as well. If we’re going to rebuild trust, or to be honest, establish it for the first time, we will need more peer-to-peer forums like mediation to get it going and sustain it.
Because on the other end of the spectrum is a financial system, an education system, a housing system, and a justice system that have all the incentives to break us further apart. Gretna gave me a chance to see this playing out on the ground, but it’s sadly nothing special. It’s the expected outcome from systems we have designed or at best tolerated.
Doing this story was quite intense emotionally. It’s one thing to know what I know about this country’s history, another to read about the consequences of that history playing out, and yet another to face it head on. Spending a week in Gretna with all these different people felt like having a face-to-face meeting with history.
Acknowledgements….
There are so many thanks to go around, and I know I will miss people but here’s an attempt
- The Fusion team whose investigation brought the horrendous policing numbers to light
- The team at NatGeo including camera jedi Victor “No Sticks” Tadeshi, producer Lucy “Fighting Irish” Kennedy, researcher Samuel “Just The Facts” Lieberman, production assistant Lea “I’m Basically Uber” Scruggs and the editors, oh dear lord the editors, who managed to pull something sound and true from hours and hours of footage
- The public officials of Gretna for (sometimes reluctantly) opening their doors to us and going on the record with their perspective. I am critical of how they’ve interpreted their own actions, but I am grateful because they have at least taken the initial steps of questioning their own outcomes which is leagues ahead of most places.
- The academic team of Peter Scharf and Sonita Singh. I’m truly sad more of our conversation didn’t make it on air, but the knowledge and perspective they shared did.
- Tat-2, the most disturbing yet also honest and self-reflective person I encountered. I hate that his job even exists and I’m glad we got to show his part in this troubling story.
- Bishop Brown. Hero.
- The people of Gretna, black and white, who shared their pride, their anger, their confusion, and their vulnerability with us.
Thank you.
